Developing a Project Manager Competency Model to Better Serve the Warfighter and the DoD

Abstract

As of today, the Department of Defense (DOD) project management competencies are structured differently from industry. Industry has made advancements in project management that the DOD does not currently take advantage of. By better aligning the DOD and PMI competency standards we can decrease cost, schedule, and performance issues. Based on previous research on the topic, the current DOD competency model is not sufficient for assessing today’s program managers. The purpose of this research is to use the three PMI industry standards to develop a survey tool to better serve the DOD acquisition workforce. We were able to create this survey tool and hope that, by using this survey tool, future research teams will be able to effectively gauge the acquisition community’s correlation between the three PMI standards and the current DOD workload. The information gathered from this research can be useful not only to DOD acquisition communities, but also can set future guidelines to program managers in order to save the DOD on schedule, cost, and performance.